Found Content

The following is a list of found content (video, articles, etc) which has attracted my attention in the past week. Not all of the content is new. It's just a listing of discovered stuff that I found interesting. In a perfect world, I would blog each of them, but alas, this is not a perfect world.

• Whole Food Republicans -- Michael Petrilli writes in the Wall Street Journal about "voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics." Basically, the idea is that red politicians should reach out to blue states. I guess the opposite is also true: Blue politicians should reach out to red states. The trick is making it work. The "Whole Food Republican" sounds vaguely like Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Con". However, Dreher's work is less about elections and more about culture.
  
• John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism -- Speaking of Whole Foods, Reason magazine does an interview with the founder of the grocery, John Mackey. Rather than a Republican, Mackey sounds more like a Libertarian. I appreciated his take on people who enter the business world. Instead of assuming a grasping attitude toward money and profit, we should realize that most are not motivated by mammon. Most entrepeneurs are simply excited about providing a better service or good.
  
• Upper Mismanagement -- The New Republic suggests that the real problem with business is business schools. The article argues that business schools have a preference for business leaders who have little interest in production or customers and more interest in management numbers.
• Obama's Christian Realism -- David Brooks really likes Obama. He especially likes that Obama has said kind things about Reinhold Niebuhr. In the article, Brooks tries to find Niebuhr in Obama's Nobel Prize Speech.
  
• Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Speech -- Honestly, I didn't enjoy the speech. The president gets kudos for taking on some really big issues, but it wasn't coherent. How exactly do we reconcile Martin Luther King, Jr, Ghandhi and George Marshall? The president declares, "But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected." What does that mean? What is the perfect human condition?
  
• How to Have an Acts Church (Part One and Part Two) -- Rick Warren looks at the church in Acts and discovers seven characteristics which includes developing small groups and equipping all members for ministry.
  
• From Liberalism to Social Democracy -- Geoffery Kurtz reviews a book of intellectual history tracing the development of social democracy to the thoughts of Enlightenment liberalism. Are liberalism and social democracy in the same intellectual family, or are they actually two separate things? The article also raises an interesting point. What is the relationship between intellectual movements and concrete events. For example, how is the development of social democracy rooted in the reality of the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th Century?
  
• Ethnic Media's Four-step Model for the News Industry's Future -- As media outlets continue to struggle in the face of new information technology, Sandra Ordonez finds lessons from the ethnic media. Specialized niche publications are growing while traditional newspapers are shrinking. One interesting idea is that media should not merely report news items. News outlets should also encourage and facilitate the conversation surrounding news items. They should realize that they exist to create communities.